New Wine Tastings: Theological Essays of Cultural Engagement

New Wine Tastings

Theological Essays of Cultural Engagement

Paul Louis Metzger

With editorial assistance

from William K. Thompson

CASCADE Books - Eugene, Oregon

New Wine Tastings

Theological Essays of Cultural Engagement

Copyright © 2011 Paul Louis Metzger. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Scriptures taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com.

A version of Beyond the Culture Wars: Contours of Authentic Dialogue, from A World for All? Global Civil Society in Political Theory and Trinitarian Theology, copyright © 2011, reprinted by permission of Eerdmans. Grand Rapids, MI. All rights reserved.

Portions of chapter 11 are taken from The Gospel of John: When Love Comes to Town from the Resonate Series by Paul Louis Metzger. Copyright © 2010. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, PO Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515.

http://www.ivpress.com.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www. wipfandstock.com

isbn 13: 978-1-60608-538-7

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Metzger, Paul Louis.

New wine tastings : theological essays of cultural engagement / Paul Louis Metzger.

x + 142 p. ; cm. 23 — Includes bibliographical references.

isbn 13: 978-1-60608-538-7

1. Church and the world. 2. Church and culture—United States. 3. Christianity and Culture. I. Title.

br115 .n87.m48 2011

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Author’s Note

As the director of The Institute for the Theology of Culture: New Wine, New Wineskins at Multnomah Biblical Seminary of Multnomah University in Portland, Oregon, I have the privilege of teaching in the Pacific Northwest. Among other things, the Pacific Northwest is known for its vineyards and its fine wines. A favorite recreational activity of many Pacific Northwesterners is to tour the vineyards and enjoy wine tastings. Visitors get to sample each vineyard’s offerings—everything from relatively young wines that are fresh and light to bottlings that have lain in the cellar for years developing depth and complexity. Each tasting gives the taster a sense of the wine maker’s work. I cannot say how you will find the following essays written in association with my work at New Wine, New Wineskins, but hopefully none of them have turned to vinegar. I offer them to you as samplings of a theological engagement of culture that I have been cultivating over the years, inviting you to linger for a while, and wishing you well on your theological-cultural travels.

Introduction

Jesus doesn’t quite fit in anyone’s boxes or programs. In fact, he has a way of exploding them. The same thing happens when you put new wine into old wineskins.

It’s not that Jesus is trying to be nebulous like Bob Dylan, who

apparently seeks to be unpredictable. Nor is he like Bono, who in spite of all his good work to get religious-right types out of their boxes to care about an expansive array of social issues, unintentionally conveys to many that the Christian religion is a left-of-center social program. While I resonate with Bono’s social instincts, the Christian religion can never be equated with an agenda—no matter the political stripe. The same thing could be said of certain religious-right figures and frameworks with their doctrinaire and moralistic tendencies. As the great Dane Søren Kierkegaard rightly reasoned, you can never reduce the Christian faith to the creed, or Christianity to Christendom. Vital personal faith in God and Jesus involving the whole of one’s person is essential.¹ One can wax eloquently about the finer points of orthodox Christology and never ever really meet the Son of God/Son of Man. Jesus is so much bigger and so much greater than any of our boxes or programs and cannot be confined to and packaged in any of our hardened skins.

The socially conscious liberals and doctrinaire, moralistic conservatives easily take offense at Jesus—whatever the age. In Luke 5, where Jesus makes use of the new-wine and new-wineskins imagery, we find Jesus claiming to forgive sins while healing a lame man. The socially conscious liberals in our day might argue, Why bring talk of personal sin into the mix? Just care for people, making their bodies whole. The doctrinaire types in Jesus’s day certainly did question him: The Pharisees and the teachers of the law began thinking to themselves, ‘Who is this fellow who speaks blasphemy? Who can forgive sins but God alone’ (Luke 5:21)? Later, Jesus’s new disciple, Matthew the tax collector, hosts a great party in Jesus’s honor at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and other nondesirables is there. Moralistic types, no matter the age, want to know, Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and ‘sinners’ (Luke 5:30)?

The religious gatekeepers of Jesus’s day—on the left and the right—have a hard time making sense of Jesus and his work. In the context of Luke 5:33–35, the Pharisees and teachers of the law of the Pharisees’ sect are taken aback by Jesus’s followers’ lack of proper religious and social etiquette. His disciples don’t fast and pray; instead they eat and drink. They are unlike John the Baptist’s and the Pharisees’ disciples, who fast and pray; in other words, Jesus’s disciples don’t follow the traditions long established. Jesus takes them back to the earliest tradition (marriage). He states that when the bridegroom (Jesus himself) is taken away from them, then his followers will fast. The real issue is not about this or that tradition, or even marriage for that matter, but one’s ultimate point of reference: Jesus is his followers’ ultimate point of reference; all social and religious customs and doctrinal discussions for them gravitate and revolve around him.

In keeping with Luke’s message, the new wine Jesus speaks of is not simply his message, but himself, as his Father tells him to proclaim. There is no Bultmannian backdrop to the gospels, or to this volume for that matter, that gives the sense that the one who preaches becomes the one who is preached;² Jesus always preaches himself as the Lord of the eschatological kingdom—in relation to his Father, as directed by the Father.³ Such a point of reference should not be taken as arrogant but as accurate. How can Jesus not preach about himself as the way, the truth, and the life, when he is the way, the truth, and the life? Jesus is not an illustration of the ideal; he is the ideal personal reality.

Now such personal reflection by Jesus may appear nebulous from time to time. How can it be otherwise? For every person is a living and mysterious reality, and so not easily classified; this is especially true of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, the Son of God. By the very nature of his being, Jesus defies succinct and simple definitions. He is not an abstract concept, but the living, incarnate Word of God. Thus, our approach to Jesus must remain open and somewhat ad hoc. We must guard against seeing him as an example or exemplar of a closed and airtight worldview. Our approach must be based on a response created by his initiative to communicate himself to us, and his desire to be true to his being as the God-Man rather than on the supposition that a properly branded Jesus will win for us a greater market share.

This volume of essays, delivered for the most part at conferences hosted by The Institute for the Theology of Culture: New Wine, New Wineskins (which I direct at Multnomah Biblical Seminary of Multnomah University) reflects an approach to the theology of culture that is neither worldview oriented nor market based, but that is centered in the person of Jesus Christ and his ways with the world. A worldview approach to the theology of culture often, if not always, approaches people and issues from the standpoint that God had a good idea when he created the world. A market-driven approach to the theology of culture often, if not always, approaches people and issues from the standpoint that God had a product and a great marketing plan. An incarnational approach to the theology of culture focuses on the living Word (God’s personal self-expression), who while proclaiming phenomenal ideas, ultimately expresses God’s truths in holy, sacrificial love poured out in life with us, by becoming human flesh and dwelling in our midst. Rather than trying to market a product, Jesus shares the core of his very life with us. Jesus is not trying to sell us something, nor is he simply trying to give us a great system of thought on which to reflect. Nor is he simply a moral example to follow. As God’s very self-expression (as the Word who exists in vital union and communion with the Father in the Spirit from all eternity), Jesus reveals God’s heart to us (See John 1:1, 18; 14:15–27; 15:26–27; 16:5–15; 17:1–6). Sent from the Father, Jesus engages us heart-to-heart through his sacrificial love poured out for us in his incarnate life (John 1:14; 3:16; 12:23–25), and wins our hearts as the Spirit of the Father and the Son pours God’s love into our hearts (John 3:5, 16; Rom 5:5; 8:1–39). And so, God’s incarnate Word becomes our motivating force and ultimate point of reference for our values, decisions, and engagement with others inside and outside the church through God’s Spirit, as we participate in his life, heart-to-heart.

The themes of the New Wine conferences, which these essays address, were chosen mostly because of real contemporary needs and crises, and because I wanted to bear witness to an expansive framework of evangelical gospel engagement. I long to see us move beyond being a two-issue movement (about abortion and gay marriage). Many of the essays explicitly or implicitly reflect my conviction that we need a Trinitarian and incarnational theology of culture to engage the world more redemptively than we often have, creating space (with lives of prophetic witness) for our views to be heard. Jesus lays down his life for his enemies rather than trying to take back Jerusalem from them. Portland, Oregon, where I teach, is by no means a bastion of evangelical Christianity and is not known for being friendly toward conservative Christianity; nor is evangelical Christianity known for being friendly to the type of folks who make up the majority of Portland residents.⁴ Against this cultural backdrop and in a way similar to Karl Barth’s and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theological-cultural approaches, I seek to engage my post-Christian or post-Christendom culture, not without Christ but through Christ. After all, Christ, as the Word made flesh, cannot be confined to Christian culture but through the Spirit enters truthfully and graciously into every culture, even into a secular one, as the Light of life and as the God in the gallows, not as the God of the gaps.

⁵

In choosing the New Wine, New Wineskins conference themes, I

intended to consider topics the evangelical movement in the United States has not usually addressed, and to engage people we have not normally engaged, or at least to engage them more redemptively. This book is not about a liberal social agenda but a holistic framework of life bound up with lifestyle evangelism—where I am being converted anew to Jesus and his calling on us today: to stumble over him and to help others stumble over him too. I don’t want to be a source of stumbling, but I want all of us to stumble over him—to come to terms with him. Hopefully, these essays that address different issues and frames of reference will assist us in moving forward toward meeting Jesus Christ anew. No matter the issue discussed, it is hoped that the approach taken bears witness to Jesus Christ’s personal identity and missional activity.

It is so easy for a missional movement to end up as a cultural artifact or monument. In Christian circles, this happens when we lose sight of Jesus as the epitome and essence and embodiment of grace and truth and of compassion and conviction, in whom we live and move and have our being. As the divine Word made human flesh, Jesus must always remain the church’s ultimate point of reference, inspiring missional engagement as we participate in his life. The issues, no matter how important, must never define us; rather, Jesus’s identity, our identity in him, and our participation in his missional engagement through the Spirit must be what drive and define us. Jesus must be our ultimate point of reference.

In Luke 5, we find that Jesus’s disciples like to party, eating and drinking because Jesus is with them. But the time also comes for them to fast, when Jesus is taken from them (Luke 5:34–35). In keeping with what is stated above, Jesus is their point of reference. He also told them this parable: No one tears a patch from a new garment and sews it on an old one. If he does, he will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old. And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for he says, ‘The old is better’ (Luke 5:36–38).

The point of the parable is not really about new or old wine. The point of the parable is that you don’t mix old and new, but that you match new wine with new wineskins. In the same way, you can’t mix Jesus’s way with other traditions. He and his disciples belong to a completely different order—one of his own making.

As social issues go, one can certainly find overlap between what I am writing about here, and what one can find in other traditions. A host of good agencies and services are committed to the poor and to HIV/AIDS prevention, to helping ex-offenders and the homeless, to preserving the environment, and to freeing oppressed communities; the list goes on. But in this introduction to a book about cultural concerns, we are talking about identity claims, and not simply about social issues. Jesus is the transcendental ground and necessary condition for the possibility of engaging redemptively these various issues, even if people are not conscious of Jesus. Although I would not equate meeting humanitarian needs solely with what Jesus is doing, I do applaud these workers of mercy for their concerns and sacrifices, especially as they overlap with what Jesus calls his church to do. Non-Christians’ acts of mercy often serve as a prophetic rebuke to the church when we as God’s people gentrify, ghettoize, and gnosticize the good news of Jesus—when we serve the interests of the upwardly mobile and dominant culture, cordoning the gospel off from the world at large, and refusing to roll up our sleeves and put flesh on our souls and match word with deed among the last, the least, and the lost.

Even though God’s people often fail to bear witness to Jesus, the church is nonetheless identified in a vital manner with the incarnate and relational Jesus who is the transcendent ground of the Christian faith. As the transcendent though incarnational and relational ground, Jesus does not desire the church to engage him and the issues of the day ultimately from an exemplarist standpoint, but from a holistic, participational framework. That is, Jesus wants us to see him not simply as the great example for how to address various social concerns and movements, but also as the ontic ground of God’s kingdom values through whom and in whom we engage the issues of the day. Just as Jesus lives in union and communion with his Father through the Spirit’s bond of love, so we as the church also live in union and communion with the Father and with Jesus through the Spirit of love. The same Son and Spirit go out into the world as an overflow of the divine communion, and we participate in the triune God’s co-missional enterprise. We must live in light of who we are as God’s communal and co-missional people.

⁶

What does this mean for the spiritual-formation and theological-education model that we at New Wine, New Wineskins at Multnomah Biblical Seminary seek to espouse and embody? Just as the Son’s life is poured out to bear much fruit in our lives (John 12:24), and just as the Spirit of love is poured into our hearts (Rom 5:5), so we like the Apostle Paul are to be poured out as drink offerings for others (Phil 2:17; 2 Tim 4:6), as we participate in the love of Jesus Christ. Rather than mentoring and ministering from a CEO model of top-down leadership, or from a static transmission-of-information worldview model, those who

participate in the triune life of God